Woman Eating (2022) -Claire Kohda
This book did more of less what I hoped it would but also what I expected
Content Warnings: Death, blood, eating disorder, sexual assault
Representation: Japanese, Malaysian, Mixed Race, eating disorder
Favorite Quote: “If you lose control of your life, you can find control in your food.”
Woman Eating is a literary fiction novel with a vaguely metaphorical fantasy element. The novel follows Lyd, a newly adult vampire who decides to live away from her mother and support herself for the first time in her life—including finding ways to feed herself without easy access to fresh blood. With ambitions of becoming an art collector and fabricating a series of generational inheritance to explain her long life span, Lyd rents out an art studio and begins interning at an art gallery.
At Lyd’s new studio, she takes a particular interest in the landlord, a soft-spoken fellow artist named Ben, and imagines ways she can live herself as a human alongside Ben and his friends who she takes a liking to. Without an understanding of her own vampirism beyond the unreliable teachings of her self-loathing mother, however, Lyd has no way of knowing her capacity for living as a human.
Throughout the novel, Lyd shows signs of disordered eating. Beginning with a desire to test her sense of mortality, then growing into an act of desperation to starve her “demon side,” Lyd’s eating habits reflect an odd affinity to non-fantastical eating disorder experiences that makes her a character that is easy to relate to and sympathize with. This is arguably the most clear metaphorical element of the novel.
There is also an intriguing but somewhat unclear racial element to the novel that reflects the author’s own experiences being mixed race. Lyd’s father was Japanese and her mother is half English and half Malaysian, so Lyd herself is mixed race, but she is also regarded as half human and half demon. This affects her sense of her racial identity as she struggles to conceptualize her mother having a racial identity beyond being a vampire and only views her human side as having an ethnicity. Without her father in her life, however, and an inability to eat the food of her culture, Lyd feels disconnected from all aspects of her racial identity.
There are quite a few aspects of the vampirism in this novel that go unexplained, but this can be excused given that the main character herself does not have great knowledge of vampirism. Much of the novel as a whole, however, feels slightly surface level and predictable. In some ways is it satisfying watching things play out how you hope, but it doesn’t make for the most gripping story. All in all, it is a good read though.